Can you think of any?
Here’s what I mean. When we set about justifying basic research in fundamental science, we tend to offer multiple rationales. One (the easy and most obviously legitimate one) is that we’re simply curious about how the world works, and discovery is its own reward. But often we trot out another one: the claim that applied research and real technological advances very often spring from basic research with no specific technological goal. Faraday wasn’t thinking of electronic gizmos when he helped pioneer modern electromagnetism, and the inventors of quantum mechanics weren’t thinking of semiconductors and lasers. They just wanted to figure out how nature works, and the applications came later.
So what about contemporary particle physics, and the Higgs boson in particular? We’re spending a lot of money to look for it, and I’m perfectly comfortable justifying that expense by the purely intellectual reward associated with understanding the missing piece of the Standard Model of particle physics. But inevitably we also mention that, even if we don’t know what it will be right now, it’s likely (or some go so far as to say “inevitable”) that someday we’ll invent some marvelous bit of technology that makes crucial use of what we learned from studying the Higgs.
So — anyone have any guesses as to what that might be? You are permitted to think broadly here. We’re obviously not expecting something within a few years after we find the little bugger. So imagine that we have discovered it, and if you like you can imagine we have the technology to create Higgses with a lot less overhead than a kilometers-across particle accelerator. We have a heavy and short-lived elementary particle that couples preferentially to other heavy particles, and represents ripples in the background field that breaks electroweak symmetry and therefore provides mass. What could we possibly do with it?
Specificity and plausibility will be rewarded. (Although there are no actual rewards offered.) So “cure cancer” gets low marks, while “improve the rate of this specific important chemical reaction” would be a lot better.
Let your science-fiction-trained imaginations rome, and chime in.
It will generate sales for popular science books and help sell newspaper, TV and magazine ads. It could make Sean Carroll a lot of money.
Surely it’s the technology achieved along the way? It doesn’t have to be the thing itself. I’m thinking primarily of the GRID,and it’s use in climate forecasting, but there is also the improvements in imaging which will no doubt find their way into medicine
“Progress towards a unified field theory is its own rewrard”
You could print that on a beer can opener, then you could open a beer!
Then you can put your feet up and read this article!
Einstein was certain that E=Mc^2, detailing the interconvertability of mass
and energy, could never be of any practical value or use. A now forgotten
astronomer declared in the 19th century that we could never learn anything
about the chemistry or even the physics of stars. Before the 1970’s theoretical
physicists told inquiring students that their questions about what might be
‘outside’ or ‘before’ the universe were nonsense since mainstream under-
standing of GR and cosmology said that spacetime ‘curved around itself’
cosmically and, ipso facto, that was all there ever could be. So there.
Someone (Haldane? Clarke?) once said, “If a great scientist tells you
something is possible, he is probably right. If a great scientist tells you
something is impossible, he is probably wrong.” Don’t bother critiquing
this… really…I know it sounds hand wavy, but there’s a large kernel of
truth in it. You don’t see it? Have a couple of beers and look at it again.
Possible fallout from deep study of a confirmed Higgs aside, one of you
hit the main (and usually unsung) fact on the head: One of the great
drivers of break-throughs in basic and applied science has always been
the ever accelerating advances in ALL forms of measurement itself.
Ignorant and posturing politicians notwithstanding, this has also been
a major driver in all industry and manufacture.
As to what I’d do with a Higgs Particle…I’d invite it in for tea and cookies
and ask politely did it have any role in conferring colossally massive egos
to our CEOs and politicos? Just a thought. 🙂
yeah, that’s a sad question, isn’t it? i was pondering it about 2 weeks ago and i think the truth is that there will likely never be any application we can imagine right now. it is very different from faraday’s time – or even that of the birth of QM.
one misconception that people seem to have is that using the Higgs you can fool around with particle masses. well – you can’t. it’s the vev you’d have to modify and that – afaik – only goes via increasing the temperature.
changing the mass of particles would on the other hand be much more practical than some here do imagine. yes, the protons (and all hadrons) masses come mainly from qcd. however, the stability of the proton and all kinds of nuclei depends very crucial and very sensitively on the mass of the quarks. playing alchemist is a bit outdated, but maybe one could tweak around to produce some lab-sized neutron stars or such fare 🙂
Obvious – deflector field/beam. It’s easier to divert the random matter in interstellar/planetary space out of our way if its mass is less relevant.
my guess is communications. the ability to keep transmissions stable over longer distances.
but like someone else already posted….we will find a way to weaponize it.
The Higgs boson can be used to regulate the velocity of a spaceship by regulating its mass. Decreasing its mass increases its velocity, while increasing the mass decreases its velocity. Arbitrarily large distances can be traversed in arbitrarily short times (as measured on the ship’s clock) by reducing the mass to a minimal level during intergalactic flights. Astronauts can take round trips to and from the edge of the universe without aging at all (their biological clocks would virtually stop, placing them in suspended animation for most of the trip), but the relativistic time dilation would cause an extremely large amount of terrestrial time to elapse—so much that the earth, the solar system, the Milky Way galaxy, etc., may no longer exist when they return to who knows what. Nobody knows.
I’m reminded of when Robert R. Wilson was Director of Fermilab and testifying before Congress – asked what Defense applications Fermilab might have, he replied that it was the sort of thing that makes the country worth defending.
Just like the early space program and “Race to the Moon” is credited for giving us, or forcing us to develop game changing technological developments like fuel cells, solar cells, water purification systems, and lets not forget Space Sticks and Tang. Haven’t we already started to receive dividend from what we have had to overcome to reach this point in the search? New ways to power, construct, operate and maintain high-T superconductor electromagnets. Other existing technologies that benefits from those like improve mass spectroscopy for environmental monitoring. High temperature superconductors will provide high power density propulsion systems for subs, planes, transit, space elevators. High temp superconductors alone will extend the life of power grids and power distribution channels. The same technologies that will be used to make higgies easier and cheaper will probably allow for “in the lab” elemental creation in the allusive theoretical island of stability.
Those are benefits that we just get from the search.
Since discovering the Higgs Boson, that will complete the standard model which will make sence to the Gauge theory and the equal to quantum mechanics. Higgs Boson couldn’t be used it is very uncertain that it will decay to particles (photons). They could be used for high graphics electromagnetic spectrums, but the Higgs Mechanism is that very thing which makes sense. This mechanism will make scientist master quantum mechanics and even more as they master quantum mechanics we will go into deeper questions Like: Is time a vector or scalar or even Tensor? Arrow of Time? Quantum Gravity?
Higgs Boson will the base of understanding quantum mechanics.
But still we can’t be sure of that cause the discovery of the Higgs Boson is only 5sigma= 99.999999777% which is still not enough.
A Higgs sucker as a cure for being overweight, or a larger version, a Higgs vacuum cleaner, so the whole world can have low gravity days!
On the basis that what will be investigated at the engineering level will be what we most need and what will make a lot of money, I would expect Higgs to deliver:
1. A new method of generating power via a gravity engine of some kind placed in orbit round the sun or just (ha!) a new way of making fusion work.
2. Ultra dense energy storage to rival and hopefully exceed oil and gas.
This is a fun game. I’m assuming we’re not talking about near future applications here, more along the lines of something useful for a Culture starship to have amongst its manipulator array. In which case: a higgs beam would be an excellent tool for pushing around dark matter.
It will give a certain subset of tracking satellites a highly advanced sense of humor.
More powerfull colliders 🙂
Perhaps we could create a device that would impress the full weight of journalistic excellence in science writing. For instance, it may be useful in increasing the gravitas surrounding the massive issue of selecting correctly between heavy-sounding homonyms such as “roam” and “rome”. 😛
Cormac mentioned it already, but I wanted to reiterate: advances in grid computing. This will surely have an impact on World Community Grid technology (BOINC) as well as other less public projects.
Technical app for the Higgs boson [aka the God Particle]:
A one-size-fits-all finger for the dike?
In the very speculative spirit of this fascinating thread, but almost certainly nonsensical as physics both present and future 😉 …
Part of a hi-tech braking system for an interstellar spaceship, or even a more compact intra-solar system craft ?
Perhaps you could use energy to produce Higgs bosons which before or during their decay might somehow be induced to interact in a suitable way with the all-pervading Higgs field to induce vacuum “drag” like a host of miniature “anchors” to slow the ship.
To be of any practical use of course it would have to be more sparing of energy than the tried and tested braking technique of chucking mass/energy out of the ship in the direction of its forward motion.
As was pointed out above the “Higgs lives for 10^-25 seconds”, if a reaction mass could be increased significantly at exactly the instant of combustion in a rocket engine, perhaps the total amount of fuel could be radically reduced?
Further to #95 and #96 – In the same vein, perhaps dark matter is “smog” accumulated over billions of years by advanced aliens using this technique to accelerate and decelerate their spacecraft, the cosmic equivalent of exhaust billowing from countless diesel buses 😉
Nonrenormalizable got it exactly right – the technological application of the Higgs boson will be none. You cannot build a nifty gadget if you must carry around an LHC to produce the relevant state of matter.
Off the top of my head, I cannot name a technological application of even the quark model, and that is almost 50 years old. Perhaps something with nuclear power, but the nuclear industry seems to have been healthier before the quark model than it is today.
I assume that “negative mass” will be the result of the higgs boson research.
In case of charged Higgs bosons, one can imagine accelerating them in a ring, so that they have a large lifetime in the lab frame. Then, one could try to get all of the bosons in the same state. If that’s possible, then perhaps it’s also possible to make the analogue of a flux qubit. The state |0) corresponds to all the bosons rotating clocwise, the state |1) corresponds to anti-clockwise rotations, and you can try to create arbitrary superpositions of these two states.
The bosons can interact with dark matter particles, so you can use this as a dark matter detector as follows. You start with the state |0), you apply the Hadamard transform U:
U|0) —> 1/sqrt(2) [|0) + |1)]
U acts on |1) as:
U|1) —> 1/sqrt(2) [|0) – |1)]
Then, you wait a while and you apply the inverse of U (which in this case is U itself). If there any interactions with DM, you don’t get the state |0) you started with back upon measurement, there will be a finite probability to find the system in the state |1). Note that when a DM particle interacts with the state |0) or |1) nothing changes to that state. The fact that the state of the scattered DM particle is different in case it scatters off |0) compared to |1), leads to the effect.
So, we can detect DM with this set-up, even though it doesn’t affect either the |0) nor the |1) state.